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List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING (2022)

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Fumer fait tousser

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Smoking Causes Coughing is currently available for VOD rental.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Gilles Lellouche, , Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra, Vincent Lacoste, voice of

PLOT: A Power Rangers-like group of heroes goes on a team building retreat and tells campfire stories; will the world end before they can solve their issues?

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: A group of avengers named the Tobacco Force destroys their enemies by shooting them with smoke and giving them cancer. A large fish tells a story about a young man who, after being involved in an industrial shredder accident, becomes a pair of lips in a pail of gore. For these and many more absurd instances, Smoking Causes Coughing could be a shoo-in for Apocryphal status.

COMMENTS:  Quentin Dupieux’s newest film, Smoking Causes Coughing, is superficially about the Tobacco Force, the “coolest avengers in the world,” according to one of their in-film fans. Power Rangers meets Danger 5, the Tobacco Force regularly saves the world from rubber-suited monsters. Recently, however, they have been having problems with insincerity and individualism. To come together as a team before meeting their ultimate nemesis, Lézardin, their boss (a rat puppet who constantly drools green slime) assigns them to a team-building retreat. There they tell stories around a campfire, and the movie becomes an anthology, returning to the Tobacco Force between stories.

As the team sits around the fire, a young girl appears and tells a story. Later one of them catches a barracuda in the lake and, yes, the barracuda tells a story. The stories are the highlight of the movie. They are inventive, twisted, existential jokes. They are also often gory.

Dupieux does not stray from his absurdist existentialism. For instance, in the first story a woman puts on a “Thinking Helmet” that promises to purify the mind. A few minutes later we are in a deadpan slasher, as if to say that if a person knows the truth, they will not be able to abide the way things are.

The pace throughout is steady but not quick. Scenes that seem too long or even pointless add to the sense of ennui and to questioning life in general. Some elements are completely unexpected—absurd, silly, and sometimes mind-boggling.

Their boss, the Chief, is the only puppet in the film; he would feel right at home in ’s Meet the Feebles. He’s utterly disgusting and also unbearably attractive to every woman in the movie. Perhaps a comment on power? Perhaps simple absurdity.

This movie is not going to change anyone’s mind about Quentin Dupieux. If you enjoyed his previous films, you’ll likely enjoy this one. If you didn’t, well… you get the point. But if you haven’t seen anything by him, and you’ve made it this far into this review, then maybe you’ll dig it. It isn’t revelatory; it’s just an existential absurdist good time.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Trying to explain ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’ is like recounting a dream: The person listening might not care, and it might not mean anything to them, but it leaves a weirdly unforgettable impression on the spectator.”–Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire (contemporaneous)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: L’ANGE (1982)

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AKA The Angel

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DIRECTED BY: Patrick Bokanowski

FEATURING: Jacques Faure, Martine Couture, Jean-Marie Bon, Rita Renoir

PLOT: A swordsman parries and thrusts with a suspended doll; a servant brings a tray of food to a handless man; a group of librarians catalog books, and then rescue a woman from a box; figures attempt to ascend a vast, steep staircase to the heavens; and a number of other actions are captured in shadow and sepia and are repeated multiple times to demonstrate variance and nuance.

Still from L'Ange (1982)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Baseball fans calculate a statistic called similarity scores to compare players, often used to determine if a given player would sit comfortably alongside other legends. The greatest players, like Willie Mays or Babe Ruth, aren’t truly similar to anyone, but the ones who come within sniffing distance are all Hall of Famers. So it goes with L’Ange. There isn’t really anything like it, but it sits comfortably on the shelf alongside such subversive classics as Meshes of the Afternoon and Dog Star Man. Every image has been created specifically for the film, but it has heavy echoes of the found-footage assembly of Decasia or the random documentary of Koyaanisqatsi. Michel Chion, writing for Cahiers du cinema at the time of L’Ange’s debut at Cannes, described the film as “A 2001 produced under the same conditions as Eraserhead.” Whatever L’Ange may be, it keeps good company with some of the most legendarily strange movies ever made.

COMMENTS: In the video to one of my all-time favorite songs, They Might Be Giants’ transcendent “Birdhouse In Your Soul,” director Adam Bernstein plays with the theme of light to reflect the tunes narrator, a nightlight. In one particularly memorable image, John Linnell (the accordion-playing half of the duo) is captured in a light that repeatedly fades out only to spring back to life. After a moment, it becomes clear that Linnell himself is responsible for the light show; a dimmer switch on the arm of his chair allows him to control the illumination, and he is mischievously turning the lights out on his own performance.

I assume that this moment popped into my head while watching Patrick Bokanowski’s challenging feature because of the frequent interplay of light and dark. But I also contend that a similar spirit of mischief is woven throughout this movie. As harsh sepia-toned beams burst through the center of the screen only to be replaced with sequences that mimic the stage but repeat at random angles and speeds, you quickly begin to suspect that Bokanowski is playing with his audience, like a cat with a mouse.

Having made an impression with his first two short films, La Femme qui se poudre and Déjeuner du matin, he clearly decided that a feature Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: L’ANGE (1982) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PLAYING WITH FIRE (1975)

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Le jeu avec le feu

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DIRECTED BY: Alain Robbe-Grillet

FEATURING: Anicée Alvina, ,

PLOT: Carolina fails to be kidnapped by a sex-trafficking syndicate, but that does not stop her father from playing along with the crooks as an excuse to send his daughter to a curious health clinic.

Still from Playing with Fire (1975)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: This bafflement features a hearty portion of stylistic and narrative eccentricities, but it might be imperfectly described as Jean-Luc Godard helming a Hostel movie while promised of a cash bonus for every tableau featuring a naked chick.

COMMENTS: Alain Robbe-Grillet indulges in a bold combination of erotica, thriller, and shaggy-dog story in Playing With Fire. The first half-hour alone is a cavalcade of coyly directed nonsense: a reminiscence about an erotic picture book; an exploding doll leaving a cats-paw burn mark; a fabricated cry for help on the back of an Arc de Triomphe postcard; a pair of goons with the graceful articulation of marionettes. And so on. There’s more than a touch of Godard in Playing With Fire, and a hearty portion of lian commentary. Considering the source, this is unsurprising. Robbe-Grillet’s greatest contribution to cinema was providing the screenplay for ‘ cryptic and beautiful chef d’œuvre, Last Year at Marienbad, but he had a long directorial career afterwards where he was left to his own mischievous devices.

The mischief begins with a voiceover by Georges Balthazar de Saxe (a stately Jean-Louis Trintignant, positively oozing “monied patriarch”) as the camera points at the household servants nominally acting out domestic tasks. The maid dusts a picture frame as an excuse to linger by the master’s door. The all-too-upright butler randomly passes a polishing cloth over nearby furniture, but is primarily focused on taking snap-shots. He sets the mantel timepiece to 4 o’clock. Why? Who can say. And more to the point, why is it that Carolina de Saxe (Anicée Alvina) failed to be kidnapped despite the considerable coordination efforts of a shadowy group of sex slavers?

I am convinced that Robbe-Grillet is playing with us—he practically admits as much in the title. There is a seeming precision to his efforts, but a tell-tale bit in the first act is heavy enough of a wink to discourage any serious lock-picking. After having been drugged in his garden by agents of the sinister syndicate, Georges de Saxe converses with his butler about the matter. There is an obvious shot of butler cocking his head toward the house, as if there were a sound. Moments later, the gesture is repeated, this time in response to an actual audio cue. This whole film is meta-charade.

The ensuing romp brings Carolina to a mental-clinic-cum-sex-dungeon, where the voyeurism motif established by the camera-clicky butler is cemented. The waif wanders a hallway arrayed with innumerable doorways with a photograph of each occupant. Inside, pukingly rich bourgeoisie enact pseudo-sadistic tableau featuring the young woman advertised on the exterior. Similarly, Playing With Fire is a showcase of our storyteller’s cinematic prowess, and wit. The nonsensical (“All men’s moustaches are fake”) mingles giddily with the sinister (threats of rape and bodily harm are scattered throughout the film like so much confetti). If you ignore the comedy, you’re left with an obtuse art-house Hostel morass. But the comedy and absurdism are real (so to speak), and it’s best to watch Playing With Fire as if not much on-screen actually happens—which is probably the point Alain Robbe-Grillet is trying to make.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A weird madcap tale that benefits from gorgeous scenery and cinematography, experimental arthouse editing, and arousing sexual vignettes.” – Ken Kastenhuber, McBastard’s Mausoleum (Blu-ray box set)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THEY CAME BACK [LES REVENANTS] (2004)

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AKA The Returned

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DIRECTED BY: Robin Campillo

FEATURING: Géraldine Pailhas, Jonathan Zaccaï, Frédéric Pierrot, Victor Garrivier

PLOT: A small French town struggles to cope with the sudden appearance of thousands of people who have mysteriously returned after having died years ago; initial bureaucratic problems give way to uncertainty about the motives of the newly resurrected.

Still from They Came Back (2004)

COMMENTS: In a film with arresting imagery, there may be no scene more powerful than that which opens They Came Back: the once dead slowly making their way into town, clean and outwardly healthy and dressed in light pastels and creepy as all get out. It is a high concept made manifest: all those we have lost over the past decade, back in the world as if they’d never been gone. It’s a powerful notion, given strength through the haunting visuals, and it’s something the film will struggle to get back to for the length of its running time.

In contrast to the visceral scares of the many risen-dead flicks that have graced screens in recent decades, They Came Back is more interested in a looming atmosphere of dread. By all appearances, the dead look and behave normally, but everyone begins to notice that they are somehow… off. Indeed, the medical community issues repeated warnings that the resurrected are not quite right (and develop a drug to render them unconscious), and one doctor in particular takes an interest in strange late-night meetings the undead are holding. From the get-go, we’re distinctly aware that there is an unseen threat that no one can understand. But that mystery is only about half the tale.

Writer-director Campillo is equally concerned with how individuals cope with this unprecedented situation. There’s the town’s mayor, who can barely stand to look at his wife when she first beckons to him. Or a couple who have very different reactions to the reappearance of their 6-year-old son. Most prominent is Rachel, a bureaucrat who avoids her lost love Mathieu until he follows her home one day like a beloved puppy. All show a determination to pick up where they left off, but each seems filled with deep and rueful reservations.

This is where the movie’s struggle to balance an examination of people pushed to their limits with a straight-out horror film becomes most acute. There’s still juice in the sight of humans moving resolutely in sync, and in particular, a scene where the mayor is confronted by a group of returnees comes as close as any moment in the film to outright shock, and even then it is far more horrifying to contemplate its ideas than to look upon anything on the screen. The movie knows it has to build to something big, that it needs to throw in something momentous to justify the journey. But it’s just not that kind of movie.

And ultimately, that dictates the finale; it just sort of ends. The dead are gone again, and the living are left to reckon with the impact of what they’ve experienced. It’s nice that the film doesn’t feel pressured to manufacture something big, but it also feels like a cheat. If you’re going to offer a “what if” premise, you probably need to offer some suggestion as to what the “if” would be. As it stands, we have a mix of character study and sci-fi mystery that doesn’t ever fully invest in either.

Like many ideas that are promising but not fully explored, the notion behind They Came Back is solid enough to have returned from the dead itself. There seems to be agreement that a single film doesn’t have the space to explore the conflict and the characters with sufficient weight, and that TV might be a more effective platform. An attempt in 2007 to adapt the material to television in the US didn’t make it past its pilot, but a French series in 2012 was a substantial hit, and eventually the concept finally went stateside with a different Americanized version. Our fascination with the frustrating permanence of death is animating a lot of popular entertainment, so we surely can expect more takes on the idea to return at any time.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an eerily elegant ghost story, all the more surreal for the realist mode of its telling… Campillo’s astonishing debut is as unnervingly oneiric as it is oddly moving.”–Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (originally published in Film4)

(This movie was nominated for review by Dwarf Oscar, who called it “creepy in an unusual way.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: TIME MASTERS [LES MAÎTRES DU TEMPS] (1982)

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AKA The Masters of Time

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DIRECTED BY: René Laloux

FEATURING: Voices of , Michel Elias, Frédéric Legros, Yves-Marie Maurin, Monique Thierry

PLOT: A boy is marooned on an alien world, and a space mercenary encounters many obstacles in his rescue attempt.

Still from Time Masters (1982)

COMMENTS: Like the younger brother of an overachiever, Time Masters has to live up to a mighty pedigree. Director Rene Laloux is already enshrined in these halls for Fantastic Planet, another Stefan Wul adaptation renowned for its trippy visuals and detailed alien worlds. Add in that Laloux’s collaborator this time around is the famed artist Jean Giraud—better known as Moebius—and it’s only natural to assume that the result will hit similarly mind-blowing heights. Alas, the comparison does the newer film no favors. Hamstrung by a plot stretched too thin and production levels of sharply varying quality, Time Masters plays like the Filmation version of its predecessor.

The film’s production seems to be part of the problem. Originally conceived for television, satisfaction with early work convinced Laloux to expand it into a feature film. Unfortunately, the budget did not expand in proportion, and a large percentage of the movie was outsourced to animators in Hungary. (So many co-producers were brought in that it can legitimately be called a Franco-West German-Swiss-British-Hungarian production.) It’s not hard to figure out which parts of the film were animated where; the adventures of Piel on the surface of the untamed world of Perdide are charming and delicate, with the boy interacting with fascinating creatures both friendly and vicious. Meanwhile, the crew on its way to rescue him is flat and inert, completely incapable of demonstrating any emotion, let alone matching the tenor of the vocal performances. Time Masters becomes a tale of two films.

The story isn’t helping matters, as it betrays the effort that goes into delaying the central goal. Having received a subspace message that a small child is all alone on a dangerous planet and in need of rescue, the response of the would-be heroes is to take their sweet time. Stopping to pick up a sage advisor, they go for an extended swim. An attempted mutiny by a deposed royal leads to a suspense-free prison break. The threat of interference by space cops is met with the breathless excitement of a board meeting. (That’s not a metaphor. They all go into an auditorium and talk it out.) You can almost feel the screenwriters making the “stall for time” gesture.

Time Masters is not without its charms. In fact, the cuter the creature, the more interesting they seem to be. Piel and his planetary menagerie are sweet and occasionally even adorable, although they are far outdone by a pair of faceless gremlins named Yula and Jad who offer a running commentary on the foolishness of those around them. They are the Threepio and Artoo of the piece, but they bring more punch than most of the humans do at their most emotive.

Time Masters is commendable as something original, featuring some dramatic visuals and culminating in an ending that is certainly bold, even if it doesn’t really pay off the story in any meaningful way. But there just isn’t a whole lot that happens, and what does happen isn’t compelling enough to be more than a passing fancy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not that the ending betrays what has gone before, as it is suitably trippy and lightly mind-bending in its way, it’s just that until that point there’s a feeling that the film is tiptoeing around anything that might seem to heavy – basically, it looks like a kids’ film… It weaves a spell if you’re indulgent enough of its whims, which include that headscratcher of a finale.”–Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

(This movie was nominated for review by Nickholas P Michell. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)